This study analyses how sustainable development issues are constructed in the Amazonian press over a five-year period between 1990 and 1994. Drawing on a constructionist framework, the research focuses on two regional newspapers' coverage to assess media roles in processes of policy-making, journalistic perceptions and practices and the construction of discourses within the context of the new ideology of sustainable development. The analysis identifies themes, actors, language and discourses revealing of an Amazonian perspective as the environment rose on the public agenda in the years before and after the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992. During these years, conflict originating in the rise of social movements is an underlying factor identified in the regional news. Using a combination of methodologies, the research comprises analyses of nearly 700 news items, 30 interviews with journalists and language and discourses appearing in the regional press. Trends in the coverage identify environmental, political and economic news framing. The most prominent themes are: the environment and development, Indian matters, health, and political and border affairs. Official sources are the most prominent actors in the news. The research shows how some issues take prominence and others are undermined in the coverage. Analysis of journalists' perceptions of news influence in policy-making, their reporting strategies and source relationships throw light on the context of news reporting and on the articulation of social and cultural definitions of the Amazon in the news. Links between news construction and wider social, political, economic and cultural processes become apparent as language and discourse analyses reveal different narratives emanating from the articulation of the concept of sustainable development. Among the main discourses identified in the news are the nationalist/developmentalist, the preservationist, the negotiating and that of the excluded.